The Taste of Many Mountains

by Bruce Wydick

  In high school Angela viewed Latin America as a corrupt, dirty place with (worst of all) mediocre universities. But at UCLA she began to return in small steps: a Latin American history class here and there, attendance at a few club meetings with a friend. But now as the plane continued its voyage through the night over the Petén jungle of northern Guatemala, she walked out of the restroom, leaned over and looked out of the cabin window, and wondered how many of her relatives might be below her, asleep in the silent darkness. She returned to her seat. The warm water on her face had made her sleepy, and she finally began to nod off.

  Her slumber was interrupted by the bing of the seat belt sign. “Alex—almost there.” Angela nudged him. Alex awoke slowly, made some strange contortions with his mouth, and licked his dry lips.

  He looked at Angela. “Were you wanting to sleep on my shoulder?” he asked, grinning. He projected his morning breath in her direction from about a foot away, an arguably socially normal distance for many Europeans, but inside the personal space of most North Americans. “Don’t be a creep,” Angela shot back, self-conscious and trying to back away while still seat belted. “My head kept bobbing when I was trying to sleep, and despite all my internal powers of concentration, I think it accidentally landed on that bony shoulder of yours a couple of times. Almost gave me a black eye.”

  Alex grinned again. “I told you that you should have bought one of these blowing-up things in the airport. Certainly you would have much less crankiness if you would have had some sleep.”

  Seeing Alex awake, the perky stewardess offered him a last chance at the beverage cart. “Juice, coffee, tea?” she asked in English.

  Alex become more serious. “Are you brewing bird-friendly coffee?” he inquired. Angela cringed and tried to escape by burying her head in the in-flight catalog of eccentric gadgets as she sipped her juice. Her eye caught a bizarre ad for a solar-heated doggie waterbed.

  “Pardon?” asked the perky flight attendant, blinking and smiling profusely, yet deeply confused.

  “Is it bird-friendly certified—the coffee you are at the moment serving?” clarified Alex.

  Her smile became more strained and awkward. “Er . . . I don’t know . . . what is that, sir?”

  “It is coffee specifically cultivated for protecting natural habitats of endangered bird species,” he replied in a monotone Dutch accent.

  “Oh . . . how wonderful,” she replied, trying to accommodate.

  “At least is your coffee fair trade?”

  “Hmm . . . I don’t think so. I’m sorry, sir.”

  “In that case, no thanks,” replied Alex, ending the exchange abruptly. The flight attendant seemed happy to wheel her beverage cart to the next passenger row.

  “Didn’t feel like engaging in a little global exploitation at the moment?” inquired Angela.

  “No, not at this moment I do not,” affirmed Alex, unfazed. “Nor at any moment.”

  Another twenty minutes went by, and the plane touched down and taxied along the tarmac to the gate, with the flight attendant giving instructions over the plane loudspeaker in nearly flawless English and then in flawless Spanish. Angela felt another quick tinge of jealousy. Why hadn’t she taken Spanish class more seriously?

  They ambled down the gate into the terminal, the darkness outside beginning to give way to dawn. The walkway was of well-worn linoleum, probably built during an earlier, more hopeful era when Guatemala had great plans for its place in the world. The aged terminal was both adorned and scented by the smashed cigarette butts on the floor, flung there by nicotine-starved passengers getting their fix after a long, smokeless flight. They passed by drug-sniffing dogs as they progressed uneventfully through immigration and customs.

  In the arrival area, they were greeted by several dozen enthusiastic new friends who offered them taxi rides in Spanish, some even trying in broken English. “Hey, meester, you and wife want ride to Antigua?” shouted a small, round man with a wispy mustache.

  “Hey, I’m not his wife,” Angela shot back to wispy mustache over the crowd. “Alex, let’s figure out what we’re doing.” She was feeling a little overwhelmed with their newfound popularity, which she suspected was related to their ignorance about local public transportation rates.

  “Well, we’re meant to meet Sofia at nine o’clock in Antigua,” said Alex.

  Angela shouted across the crowd to wispy mustache in English, “Hey—how about twenty-five dollars to take us to Antigua?” Others vied with wispy mustache to accept the offer, but he had been first.

  “No problema,” he replied as he fought his way through the crowd. “My car is over here. You two, come.” He motioned to them to follow him as he strode victoriously to his taxi.

  “You overbid,” noted Alex as they walked to the car. “He accepted your offer much too readily. You should have ground the little taxi drivers down to the lowest price they were willing.”

  Angela knew Alex was baiting her, but she retorted anyway. “Don’t think I’d care to ride in a car with the guy who’d win that bid,” she replied. “Ever heard of adverse selection? The only guy who accepts a low price like that is probably a kidnapper or something. Alex”—she looked at him with her best serious expression—“I probably just saved your life.”

  “In that case I will reward you by permitting you the front seat.” He squeezed into the back of the cramped two-door Toyota where he sat with his legs bent up close to the hair that flowed over his ears.

  Angela asked the driver in Spanish, “How far is Antigua?”

  “Pues, not far, maybe forty minutes,” he replied.

  Alex gave his nascent Spanish its first test-drive. Intending to ask the driver if he was from Guatemala City, he instead asked smoothly, “Sir, are you in Guatemala City?”

  Wispy mustache stared at Alex in the rearview mirror with a look that seemed to be asking himself why they allowed these long-haired hippies high on drugs to enter his country. “Yes, and you are too, my friend,” the driver said, gave him a condescending grin, and shook his head.

  Angela laughed and gazed outside the passenger window to see the dawn shedding its light on a new day in Guatemala City. So this was home.

  CHAPTER 2

  Angela

  GUATEMALA CITY IS ONE OF THOSE HOMELY AND CRIME-INFESTED cities that looks better in the dark but is safer in the daytime. And as the beat-up taxi sputtered out of the small international airport through the city’s spartan downtown, Angela watched as concrete houses and potholed streets became illuminated by the peach-colored haze of the new morning. Old Blue Bird school buses filled the streets, pressed into service after their retirement in the United States, violating the early morning sky with noisy cloudbursts of diesel. Purchased as castoffs, they had been driven down through Mexico and sold to the urban public transit system. Sturdy iron racks were welded on top to haul passengers’ wholesale goods and agricultural produce to urban markets. Despite having been repainted with colorful designs, faded black letters on the sides of the buses testified to a former life, reading “South Milwaukee Unified School District” and “Chattanooga Detention Facility.” The buses were already jammed with passengers headed to market at dawn.

  The taxi rattled its way up the mountain grades on the Pan-American Highway as it left Guatemala City behind in the distance. Angela noticed that the billboards offering discounted cell phone plans and cable TV service became fewer and farther between. The gritty blight of urban sprawl began to give way to small farms with vegetables, cash crops sown in tidy rows. After a short time they turned to the south and began to descend from the Pan-American into Antigua, the old capitol. After a few miles the taxi entered the city and clattered along the narrow, cobblestone streets, the sound waves generated by the noise of its loose bolts and aging muffler ricocheting off the exterior walls of the pastel stucco buildings.

  They passed by colonial-style houses with black iron lanterns hung off the sides of their facings and finally under the clock tower of the beautiful y
ellow Santa Catalina Arch. The contrast between Antigua and sooty Guatemala City could not have been more stark. While the latter remained one of the unsightly capital cities of Latin America, Antigua, with its Spanish Mudéjar architecture, could have been confused with seventeenth-century Seville. Signs for Spanish-language schools were ubiquitous as were their perky North American and European pupils, busily walking from guesthouse to coffee shop to language lesson. Finally, at shortly past eight a.m., they pulled up to a tree-lined street that bordered the central square.

  Angela paid the driver, and she and Alex walked with their backpacks to a café on the square. A waiter approached them, and they ordered breakfast and coffee. Their table looked directly onto the square. Angela and Alex sat and watched Antigua begin a new day. Even this early in the morning, older locals were starting to congregate near park benches. A flock of about twenty young children in tidy uniforms pranced to school along a path that cut diagonally across the central square. A teenage couple, also in school uniform, sat on a bench and caressed each other’s hair. The warm smell of elotes, the fried corn on the cob sold by vendors in the central square, filled the sunny morning air.

  While they were waiting for their breakfast, a young shoe-shine boy approached.

  The boy pointed to Alex’s feet. “Your shoes are full of dust.”

  Alex politely rejected the offer: “No gracias, amigo.”

  The boy ignored the refusal, opened his shoe-shine kit, and began to work on Alex’s loafers. The other shoe-shine boys gathered round to see the big fish that the boy had landed. They formed an inquisitive huddle around the table just as the waiter arrived with their breakfast: eggs, tortillas, beans, and goat cheese. “Vayanse, chicos.” The waiter half-heartedly motioned the boys away with a faint wave of his hand, but the command lacked both spirit and authority. The boys retreated a few steps, but with no other potential customers in sight, gradually returned as soon as the waiter turned his back to go inside the kitchen.

  Angela looked at the food on her plate, suspecting the boys hadn’t eaten breakfast that morning. “Want a tortilla?” Angela asked.

  “Si!” they replied, and Angela divided her tortillas among the boys. She had never been a big breakfast fan anyway and was also feeling slightly woozy after lack of sleep on the red-eye flight and the bumpy ride to Antigua.

  At that moment a woman in her late twenties walked up to their table. She was Latin American, but almost certainly not Guatemalan. She wore turquoise earrings and a blue blouse, but also a backpack, heavy jeans, and leather boots. She was just slightly plump, with fair skin and perfectly straight brown hair. A black unibrow over her dark brown eyes made her resemble a graduate-student version of Frida Kahlo wearing narrow, thick-rimmed academic glasses. “Sofia Cavallera?” asked Angela. There was a twinkle of affirmation in the brown eyes.

  “I see you’ve made a few amigos,” remarked Sofia. “Yes, Antigua, the town where the resistance of the tourist’s unshined shoe is futile.”

  She turned to Alex. “Alex, your professors warned me about you in their e-mail,” she laughed.

  Angela had also learned quite a bit about Sofia since receiving the assignment. She had graduated first in her enormous undergraduate class at the University of Buenos Aires with a double major in mathematics and economics. She had been accepted enthusiastically by most of the highest-ranking economics programs in the United States, including the two most renowned, MIT and the University of Chicago. Already she had two papers from her dissertation forthcoming in prestigious economics journals.

  Sofia had earned an early reputation as a kind of economics “detective.” Her research agenda was disarmingly simple. She sought to determine whether programs in developing countries collecting large sums of money from governments and ordinary people actually worked. A more difficult question than one might imagine, it required both a creative mind and masterful use of statistical methods. Moreover, her easygoing demeanor concealed how ruthlessly efficient she was at uncovering the truth.

  Angela had heard one particular story about Sofia through her advisor, who had sat next to her in a seminar given at Berkeley. A well-known but rather blustery researcher from the World Bank, Garrison Blumenthal, had come to present an academic paper. His work had “revealed stunningly large effects” from an electrification program the Bank had piloted in several countries. Basing their decision largely on Blumenthal’s celebrated results, the Bank planned an expansion into more countries the following year. The seminar that day was packed with an enthusiastic crowd of professors and their graduate students, crammed into a room that was far too small for the big event. Unfortunately for Blumenthal, the crowd included Sofia, who had been working on the same data. Using a newer and more incisive econometric methodology, her findings had revealed that essentially all of the “stunningly large effects” Blumenthal had “revealed” were attributable to a fatal underlying bias in his empirical technique.

  It took awhile after Sofia raised her hand in the seminar for Blumenthal to finally call on her. But when he did, and she graciously but decisively unloaded the bad news, Blumenthal’s expansive forehead underwent a series of spectral transfigurations. An ashen-white upon the initial ingesting of the remarks was followed by an alternating fiery red and cabernet purple during a series of increasingly defensive yet decreasingly effective rebuttals, by which time the Berkeley faculty had seen Sofia’s point and began to help Blumenthal conceptualize his error. The cabernet slowly faded to a light olive as the last of his counter-arguments withered in the dense humidity of the crowd, at which point he interrupted his failing confutation with a request for directions to the men’s room.

  The World Bank’s expansion of the program was put on hold.

  Sofia’s recent research had been funded under the same USAID coffee grant that supported the fieldwork of Angela and Alex. She had been collecting data in Guatemala for several months as part of the study, focusing on the economic impacts of fair trade coffee.

  While Angela had heard about Sofia’s reputation, her lack of pretension made it hard for Angela to feel intimidated for very long. And she felt honored to have Sofia leading their little traveling research group. “Sofia, what’s the plan?” Angela inquired.

  “Well, I thought we could head right out to our research site in Huehuetenango. We can meet Richard when we get there, and we’re not going to get much done here in Gringo-tenango.” Just as she said this, a gaggle of awkward-looking Americans ambled by with their Spanish teachers on the way to a tourist museum. “Shall we take the chicken bus? It only costs about two dollars.”

  “Two bucks? For a four-hour ride?”

  “Yep. And worth every centavo. You’ll see.”

  In truth Angela felt a little wary of the chicken bus, but in the end she rationalized that it might be a good way to begin to get to know Guatemala. “Sounds like a bargain,” she replied, feigning enthusiasm and ignoring the butterflies that had just hatched from their little cocoons in her stomach. “Lead the way.”

  They hopped on one of the souped-up old Blue Bird school buses that had “Huehue” painted in colorful cursive script above the front windshield. “Hang on to your stuff inside,” said Sofia. “Touristy-looking backpacks have a way of getting off the bus before their riders.”

  They sat in some seats toward the back and waited as the bus began to slowly fill up. A few twentysomething tourists got on board, but mostly it was Guatemalan indigenous people of all ages. A mother with three young children handed a large burlap costal full of goods to the driver’s assistant, who heaved them up to the iron rack on the bus’s roof where another assistant tied down the bulky items.

  Angela watched as a teenage girl talking on her cell phone settled into a seat near the students. Her eye was captured by the young girl’s colorful huipil, the hand-embroidered blouse worn by Mayan women of all ages. The huipil was decorated with embroidered birds, pieces of fruit, and flowers—a decorative bouquet that lay like a garland around her sweet,
round face. An old man, probably in his late seventies, dressed in the traditional Mayan clothing worn by older men, slowly settled himself into the seat behind the teenage girl, directly across the aisle from Angela.

  The old man stared across the aisle of the bus at Angela, flashing metal teeth that were the victims of decades of amateur dental work. “Buenos dias, mi amor,” he cooed with seasoned octogenarian charm. “Una flor de primavera.” Angela had become his spring flower. His breath was seasoned with some type of peppermint liquor.

  “Angela, you have a new admirer,” said Alex with a snicker.

  “Should we leave you two alone?” added Sofia with eyebrows raised.

  Angela regained her composure and responded in Spanish. “This is my friend Sofia. She’s older and much more mature than I.”

  The old man slowly redirected his gaze toward Sofia. He smiled a long, romantic smile. “Ah . . . muy bien.” Sofia laughed and rolled her eyeballs, but Angela was content that at least the old man’s affections had become divided between the two of them.

  After nearly twenty minutes of waiting for the bus to fill up, the driver launched ahead about half full but began to add more and more passengers as they left town. The man who had been lifting people’s belongings on the roof rack stayed behind in Antigua, so whenever the bus stopped, people jumped on with bags full of vegetables, meat, grain, slain animals, and cages full of preslain ones. A woman climbed on board with an armful of bean sacks, a sleeping infant tied to her back under a blanket, and a stack of tortillas wrapped in yellow cloth balancing on her head. She clutched the hand of a lethargic toddler who looked badly in need of a tissue.

  As the bus bounced along the cobblestone streets to the outskirts of Antigua, Angela sat mesmerized by the colorful, rolling bazaar of animals, vegetables, and humanity with all of their respective noises and smells. Salsa music blared from the bus driver’s radio, and the inside of the bus smelled like a collage of farm products. So these were her people. She felt like she should be feeling a little more comfortable in the local atmosphere than she actually did. Wasn’t this all supposed to be in her blood?